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iTunes Music Store - 'Coolest Invention of 2003'
Pingsmoth writes "Time Magazine has just named the iTunes Music Store as their Top Coolest Invention of 2003. Also among this year's favorites are 'fish-skin bikinis, a new love drug, the car that parks itself, and the invisible man'."
Making some digital media available online is not new.
I remember having the possibility to purchase media online long before this.
Now, if, of course, having these integrated in iTunes is cool, I somehow doubt it is that "cutting edge" (even though I am a Mac enthusiast and I love OSX).
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Much as I think Apple have created an amazing proof of concept in the Apple Music Store I am not convinced it qualifies as an invention.. Downloading music off the internet is not new and paying for it is not new either... Now if they radically opened up the distribution to bypass the majors... now that would be rather revolutionary... but we'll have to see how far they take it..
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
iTunes integrates a music store with a music player. Ooh. Maybe I'm missing something because I'm only using it on Windows, but it doesn't exactly wow me the way I expected the 'Coolest Invention of 2003' to.
Frankly, I'm even disappointed with the Segway. They shouldn't be handing out this invention to anything that doesn't have wings at this point.
This counts as an "invention"?
Look, the absolutely coolest invention of 2003 is the USB wristwatch. My watch holds all the essential stuff I used to keep on a diskette. Nothing helps bonding like showing people that your watch can store porn. Or a PowerPoint presentation. Or your latest baby photos. Whatever they need: my watch has it.
But iTunes? I can't carry it on my wrist.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Much as I like iTunes... spot the AOL Time Warner and iTunes connection.
my favorite would have to be the snorkel fm radio. Of course, the wet babe in the bikini may be influencing my opinion.
* Especially if you've been facing imminent extinction for some 20-odd years.
Newt-dog
My Doctor prescribed daily nasal saline irrigation, hehe
A pocket nuclear fusion reactor is an invention, a biplane made out of recycled cheese is an invention, a new kind of breaking system for cars is an invention.
iTunes is a store. It happens to be on the internet. That's not an invention, no matter how well executed it is.
Beep beep.
Must have slept in longer this morning then I thought. Good thing 2003 is over. Those last 2 months went buy really quickly. Nothing significant must have been invented...
iTunes for Windows is my official new favorite MP3 player.
I am proceeding to rip all my 500+ CDs into iTunes. With one click.
Winamp has served me well for many, years, but it lacks the snazzy playlist/library editor, and the ability to transfer music from CD, to the hard drive, tag it, and add it to my playlist at the click of a button. Literally.
Sure, it's a little slow, but who cares. Its functionality is unmatched. The music store is snazzy, too.
Good move, Apple, with iTunes for Windows. You may see a future Mac / iPod customer soon...
Sorry, but something that gives you a longer erection is hardly the successor to MDMA.
Peace and love, y'all
While writing a little multithreaded print workflow app in AppleScript for the client, I struck upon an idea: what if I could expose the functions of iTunes using AppleScript in a client/server type arrangement, and then make those functions accessible across the network to a Debian system running a modified dselect iTunes browser? AppleScript is pretty powerful, as any seasoned Mac user will attest, so it was quick work to create a handy little mutithreaded fully re-entrant AppleScript based server for the core iTunes functions (load song, play song, browse playlist, buy song etc).
The next part was to patch dselect on the Linux side so it could connect to my AppleScript server/wrapper on the Mac. I'd previously extended dselect with a Scheme-scriptable plugin, so it only took me a day or two to modify dselect with some Scheme macros so that it emulated to look and feel of iTunes (using ASCII art of course!!), but accessing the actual iTMS functions though the network exposed AppleScript..errr..script.
It worked a treat!! It is now a simple matter of running dselect on my Debian box to browse the iTMS, as long as the Mac over in the corner running the AppleScript wrapper is turned on of course. I have actually implemented a direct USB->USB cross over connection to get around bottlenecking problems with our Ethernet so I don't have to put up with skipping in iTMS MP3 playback. Now it works great!!!
The final step will be to patch apt-get with iTMS interface functionality...then buying my favorite music legally will only be an apt-get install Justin-Timberlake away!
Which is nice.
Stop supporting the murder of thousands of helpless fish! Don't you understand that millions of fish are being senselessly killed and raped of their skin just to support a fashion trend? How would you like it if somebody wore your skin?
I wish that you could feel the suffering that our friends in the ocean are feeling every time their skin is being harvested for pure capitalist profit. It tears my soul apart when I hear someone advocating such violent acts against creatures that have brains twice as complex than our own!
I'm going to go listen to some emo and cry about what you said. I hope you're happy, killing fish and sending people like me into deep, dark, depressive states.
Go to Hell,
Your Friendly PETA Activist
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Surely that is the coolest thing in the world, I've seen the adverts, its lets me do more with less, I can consolidate all my domains down to just 4. AND I can then slide.
Microsoft Server 2003 is the coolest invention of the year, and MacDonalds are a healthy food option.
Wha' da' ya mean dominated by advertising ? Me and Mary Beth were only on Jerry Springer twice.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Ethics:
iTunes - Apple takes it's (big) cut and then the Artist's (frequently RIAA affiliated) label takes most of the rest.
Magnatune - The artist gets 50%!!!
Again, no contest. Instead of feeling guilty about fueling a powermad monster when you buy music you can feel good about supporting the people who actually made it!
Actually, according to Steve Jobs, Apple doesn't make any profit from the iTMS. Their cut of the proceeds barely covers their costs, apparently, while the RIAA takes the lion's share (leaving the artist with a pittance, of course).
(This info came from Jobs' recent financial results conference call (of which the iTMS data can be found in this CD Freaks new item (with a link to the original story from The Register.))
Other than that, I mostly agree with the points that you raised in your post.
D.
Salmon skin bikini? I'd rather go naked to the beach. On a second thought, I already do. And have salmon-skin sushi on the beach. Isn't that a better combination? :)
Cozinha para as massas (e para geeks)
he Fab Four's label, and - according to legend - the appleinspiration for the name Jobs and Woz gave their kit computer
I heard the apple of Apple came from the story of Alan Turing's suicide.
From the article:
"At most, Jobs is left with a dime per track, so even $500 million in annual sales would add up to a paltry $50 million profit. Why even bother?"
Excuse me? A paltry $50 MILLION dollar profit?!?
'Paltry' and '$50 million dollar profit' don't belong in the same sentence.
This mentality is what's screwing the entire downloadable music process. It's not about whether it's profitable, it's about whether it's profitable enough.
Just for them saying that, I'm going to download some MP3s tonight. WTF...
Tal
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Smart Playlists is what did it for me. Being able to categorize my music by how much I listen to it and my favorite artists instead of having to add each and every song by hand is a great time saver. Maybe the dudes over at nullsoft can borrow this idea...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I can see people having trouble with Time's use of the word "invention". It's their language, not Apple's. So many have used patents in an abusive way, it's easy to get into a defensive posture on even hearing the word invention. In the context of the Time article, "creative consumer offering" would better fit what they are talking about.
A product is more than a list of features. It's also about philosophy. Fairness, paying attention to the overall experience, and caring about behind the scenes detail is all part of this. Most consumers aren't likely to know that Apple is paying for the high-quality Fraunhofer IIS MP3 codec to let them use it for free in iTunes. Don't expeect to see things like that from MS/Napster. As any Linux user can tell you, beauty is more than skin deep.
SlipHead.com is a cool new site following in this trend if any of you are interested. It's basically a free forum for the exchange of ideas with a methodology similar to open-source software. Take a minute to check it out!
It's so cool that anybody who doesn't live in the United States can't use it! THAT'S SO FREAKING COOL, ISN'T IT!? ARRGH!!
[Breathes]
Seriously though. One would have thought that, when releasing a product to a world-wide audience, the software would be usuable by said audience. As it stands, when things like this happen, it just demonstrates that the United States still thinks that it's the center of the Universe. Grrr.
Ah, those shameless Europeans. :-)
And now, with fish-leather thongs, I can see millions of women saying "no, honestly honey, the smell's from my bikini."
Start a happiness pandemic
Actually, record contracts are geographically specific. Contractually, a record label gets the rights to sell recordings on behalf an artist in one specific country or group of countries. For example, the rapper Dizzee Rascal is on XL Records in the UK, but will be on Matador in the US. Since labels are responsible for promoting and manufacturing records, they usually limit themselves to a certain region. It makes sense in terms of physical recordings being sold through shops. I have to agree that such a system doesn't make sense online. However, you run into the same issues with books and electronics as well.
This doesn't make the U.S. the hub for all music. In fact, there is a considerable amount of international music that never makes it to the States. There are even bands from Canada that don't make it to the U.S.
I believe we might be overlooking what the phrase "at most" means. Apple's probably outlaid millions in R&D, hosting, advertising, etc to make -- at most -- $50 million annually. At the least, Apple might not even be making the dimes mentioned above. The return on investment is perhaps not the best as far as Apple's stockholders are concerned, as another post mentions -- if taken at face value.
That's why iPod sales are so important. When increased iPod sales, or even sustained iPod sales to Windows users in the face of new competition, and only then, is "WinTunes" a good idea and produces a better ROI than buying US Treasury bonds.
Folks, Apple's a big corporation. A fifty million dollar gain annually is, whether we like it or not comparing it to the scale of dough in our bank accounts/wallets, not horribly big money.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
A meaningless question in the real world. You need to look at the downside, or the overall risk. For example, what's the odds of either investment resulting in a -100% result? Most likely the 20% potential return is riskier. There's also questions of liquidity.
There's also the concepts of building a brand image and getting in early to grow a market which is still pretty nascent. *That's* how a CEO serves his long term shareholders properly. The "gimme billion percent profit margin now!" daytrader "I've owned this stock for two hours and I haven't doubled my money yet!" types can go get bent. It's their influence that has led to so many BS products and ripoffs and overpriced junk, especially in the tech market.
--- Ban humanity.
"It's a disarmingly simple concept: sell songs in digital format for less than a buck and let buyers play them whenever and wherever they like--as long as it's on an Apple iPod."
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Again, wrong.
You can tell the author of this article never actally used iTunes or the iTunes music store. The iPod is completely optional.
I don't have an iPod and I've been using iTunes for years. I will probably never get an iPod. Still, I'm a daily user of iTunes.
It was my fault for reading this silly article. I mean, this is Time magazine. What do they know about technology? Just enough to write some copy. The harm here is that it really short-sells iTunes AND the iTunes Music Store by harping on an optional component.
--Richard
Purifying water (one of the lauded inventions) is a cool thing, very relevant to billions around the world, but doing it by distillation is just a joke.
There is a much simpler and just as effective way to purify water in tropical or desert countries: place it in a transparent plastic bottle in the sun for a day. The water heats to 80 degrees and after a few hours is totally sterilised. The mud and gunk settle to the bottom, and what's left is clean and drinkable.
I spent a few days on this once, trying to improve the process of separating the gunk from the water: the principle was to extract the gunk from the bottle which could then be closed and carried some distance. My design requires a straw and a bit of clay. But even that's not worth doing: to solve the problem of drinkable water in most of Africa, all one would need is to ship a billion or so used PET bottles.
Sigh. People like complex solutions to simple problems.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
So what this is saying is...
If I build a mouse (click click, not squeak squeak) that just happens to be the most responsive, comfortable mouse on the market... Does that mean I invented the mouse?
BMW makes very nice cars... Does that mean they invented "very nice cars"? No, of course not.
Maybe if I had something truely original and revolutionary in the new design, I could claim to have invented that part of it. But just because you came up w/ a better version of what's already out.
Nitpicking I know, but I get peeved when people say Edison invented the light bulb.
Besides, I never considered Time to be a good source of judging ANYTHING. There's better stuff out there.
You think Apple doesn't want to sell you stuff because of some center-of-the-universe conceit or other? They would gladly sell you anything you wanted, anything they could convince you you wanted, if their deals with the labels allowed it. They don't -- and this isn't different from any traditional music licensing in that way.
The next company you run into that could make a bazillion dollars in a foreign market, but chooses not to because they're a bunch of arrogant Americans, that'll be a first. You post a story about that one then.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The "car that parks itself" was the biggest disappointment of 2003 for me. I sometimes drive around for 40 minutes searching for a parking space near my house in Amsterdam. I would love to have a car that finds itself a space after I get home.
Turns out it only manages the 2 second parallel parking routine. Now that helps. And it "senses kerbs": I wouldn't try this on the canalside parking spaces we have a lot of here. This system isn't even a good idea for tourist rental cars.
using this to sell iPods isn't exactly the greatest idea, IMO
I'd trust Steve Job's business sense over yours any day unless you've managed to start a company as successful as Apple and then managed to save it from the administrative blunders of the next few CEOs.
The iPod is now Apple's highest margin product. If they sell $2000 of computer or $2000 of iPods, they make more money on the iPods. The iPod is the most popular portable mp3 player on the planet, so Apple must be doing something right with their sales strategies.
The majority of your 99 cents goes to the RIAA. I highly doubt that the RIAA trickles any of that money down to the labels who will spread it out amongst their artists.
The RIAA's cut is exactly $0.00. The money goes to the label, whose job it is to pay the artists. If an artist doesn't want to deal with a big label, they can always use CDBaby and put their music on the iTMS and get a very large cut of the profits.
t'nera semordnilap
This isn't accurate. I installed Itunes a week ago on my Win2k laptop. I've downloaded about fifty songs (mostly old tunes I loved as a kid), and played them a lot. I don't own an iPod. I don't even own a Macintosh, although that will probably change when I buy my next laptop.
Further, people who have CD burners can burn purchased songs from iTunes onto an Audio CD that will play in any CD player. I *think* the software limits you to making only ten CDs for each tune, but as far as I know that's the only limit.
Apple apparently is using iTunes to sell iPods, but you definitely don't need an iPod to use and benefit from the iTunes service.
Catherine
It's Rip. Mix. Burn.
not
Rip. Mix. Burn. Distribute on a P2P Network.
If the R/W/B campaign indicates piracy to you, that says more about you than it does Steve Jobs.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Who cares about the gadgets, just show me the leather bikinis.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Maybe I shouldn't have provided that figure for the lazy people, since you missed the point. I'll spell it out for you: iPods make up 80% of *all* of the hardware mp3-type players out there. You're right, there are hundreds of *kinds* of players, but guess what - only Joe Shmoe runs ShmoeMP3, only Bob Dobbs runs DobbAmp v2.0, etc. Factor out all those, and you've got iTunes for Mac, iTunes for Windows, WinAmp, WMPlayer, and Real Player. 2 of those software players play the AAC files that are used on the #1 dominant hardware player, the iPod... which was the point of my link. I don't give a crap about the software, we're talking hardware, particularly since the software is all free - it's the hardware, and the money you pay into it, that lock you into a solution.
Here's another take - look at the Dell player. It can't play the open-standard MPEG-4 audio files that the #1 dominant player, with 80% of the market can play. Instead, it plays some sort of closed-standard proprietary WMA files (and the MP3 and WAV which both can play. No AAC, though).
Again, yes, 80% of the hardware players out there can play AAC files. Give it a year or two, and 19% of the rest will be able to, too, with firmware updates. That's the nice part of open-standards like MPEG-4.
Surely you're joking. A Bad Guy would just burn the CD once with iTunes. After that, iTunes' limitations and the concept of "playlists" would be irrelevant, because the information would be in an unprotected format. They could then make 10000 copies of the CD, or re-rip it and upload it to a p2p network. He's slightly inconvenienced by the burning step, but that's something he only goes through once per 10000 copies.
Re-ripping takes time. Nonetheless, yes, once the "bad guy" has the Redbook CD, he can put it into a high-speed mass-duplicator and burn away. I fail to see how this reflects poorly on AAC or iTunes.
Now look at what a Good Guy goes through: suppose he has a portable player that doesn't know how to play files downloaded from iTunes (as is the case for every single portable player on the market, with the exception one single product: the iPod).
When you say it like that, you're putting horrible spin on your argument. "Every single portable player on the market, with the exception of one single product: the iPod". Come on now. As I've said, and as I showed in that link you never clicked, 80% of the marketshare belongs to iPod. So, let's just revise and continue:
Now look at what a Good Guy goes through: suppose he has a portable player that doesn't know how to play files downloaded from iTunes (such as one of the many players that collectively make up 20% of the market, but individually only account for a few percent each).
He uses iTunes to burn a CDR, then rips the CDR, then encodes it into whatever format his player knows how to play. He's using up a CDR every time he wants to do this, just so he can make one transcoded (with artifacts thanks to twice-lossy encoding) copy of the song. He'll probably do it in batches (10 or so songs per CDR) so he doesn't use CDRs so fast. You don't see this as inconvenient?
Not terribly because...
I guess it might not be too bad, if you can virtualize the burn-to-CD part to not actually have to use physical media. (I haven't checked to see if this is possible.) If you can "burn" to an ISO image file on hard disk, then it'll be merely stupid, and only slightly (but still gratuitously) inconvenient
Yes, you can. Right within iTunes, in fact. There's a "convert to..." selector that converts the track and resaves it on the hard drive. No CDs necessary.
-T
Just because some of you prefer to use lower quality software and non-intuitive buggy crap does't mean that us Mac users are retards. I know fellow mac users that could run circles in unix knowledge and/or programming knowledges and I also know mac users who know nothing beyond clicking their icon in the dock. Truth is..you can go any way you want in the Mac world, even if you just want something that 'just works'.